A former national security adviser to President Donald Trump lit up his former boss in a searing op-ed Thursday in the Wall Street Journal in the hours after news broke he would oust Mike Waltz from the same role.
“Donald Trump’s chaotic national-security governance is in full flood,” wrote his former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
“Whether it’s risking American military operations, making volatile, highly dubious tariff decisions, hiring uninformed senior advisers, or seeing senior government officials dissenting from presidential decisions, the disarray is palpable and likely to spread.”
The 76-year-old Bolton lamented that things could've been different.
“Not in my experience have emojis been deployed as they were during the inexplicable group chat on Signal. For Mr. Trump, however, chaos is embedded in his DNA and endemic in his team,” he wrote.
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He pointed to Vice President JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, the Special Envoy to the Middle East, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as perpetrators of the chaos.
“Mr. Vance hied himself off to Greenland to denounce Denmark’s administration of that Trump-coveted island,” Bolton said. “Denmark’s foreign minister metaphorically slapped the administration’s wrist, emphasizing correctly that this is no way to treat close allies. Even congressional Republicans now see the Vance style as a problem.”
“Mr. Witkoff meets alone with Vladimir Putin, and now includes crushing the Houthis. Shadow secretary of state? Not bad for someone without diplomatic experience,” Bolton added.
He also questioned Rubio’s ability to do his job as he's surrounded by special envoys who he surmised are straining his capabilities. Bolton believes that both foreign governments and interest groups in the U.S could exploit what he called "America’s bureaucratic disarray"— and warned it's already underway.
He later added, “Mr. Trump further demonstrated the incoherence of his approach by firing top-level intelligence officials and NSC senior directors.”
“There’s no good solution given Mr. Trump’s character,” Bolton opined. “Nonetheless, his advisers should improve the decision-making process, if not for his benefit, at least for America’s.”